Local authors happy to give back in return visits

"The biggest thing that happened to me was getting a scholarship and learning about literature," said de la Pena. "I feel like I owe UOP basketball everything.

"This is probably the most important appearance I've made this year. It's the one I've been looking forward to all year."

De la Pena, the first member of his family to attend college - on a University of the Pacific basketball scholarship in 1995-96 - returns to the campus Wednesday. He'll discuss his career as the author of four novels at Grace Covell Hall. It's part of Pacific's Latino Heritage Month program.

De la Pena, 38, a "non-reader" until he arrived at Pacific from San Diego's Palomar College, has a very non-fictional message to deliver.

"The biggest thing I try to really talk about is that Mexican-American students are the most likely to drop out of college," de la Pena said recently from Washington, D.C., where he'd been discussing "paths to literacy" at four high schools. "It's especially big because a lot of Mexican-Americans get very guilty about being the first in their family to go to school.

"Literacy is a huge challenge for second-language learners."

While de la Pena received a scholarship to play point guard for Pacific's basketball team, he studied creative writing and psychology.

"I discovered reading pretty much at UOP," he said. "The first book that blew me away was (Alice Walker's) 'The Color Purple.' It just grabbed me. I was like, 'I wanna do that.' "

He has, writing four California-based novels since 2005. He's been working for 18 months on a fifth ("The Living"), which will be released in 2013: "I'm super-excited about it." He's also published stories in five literary journals.

A native of National City, de la Pena went on from Pacific to earned a master's degree in creative writing at San Diego State University.

His first book, "Ball Don't Lie" (2005), was made into a movie. The main character in his third ("We Were Here") is from Stockton and some scenes are set on San Joaquin Delta waterways.

"Mexican WhiteBoy" (2011), the focus of Wednesday's event, was banned from schools in Arizona for supposedly being "anti-Caucasian."

"It's crazy," de la Pena said. "It's really disappointing. Right now, it's in the courts. I've had a lot of pro bono law services offered to get it re-instated."

It'll be freely circulated in Stockton - with 1,000 copies being donated to Franklin and Edison high schools by Pacific's Latino Community Outreach committee.

"Matt's books are written in the language of teenagers about their lives right here, right now," said Susan Giraldez, an associate professor in Pacific's department of modern language and literature. "Matt is writing about ... white kids, Asian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, African-Americans and all ethnic mixes. ... His novels are meant for young people who think reading isn't for them."

"That's amazing," said de la Pena, who now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. "Yeah, its pretty incredible. I've never had anyone make the effort to go into the community like that. That's special. It's a great town."